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Feed of posts on WordPress.com tagged "communitas"Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:31:58 +0000http://en.wordpress.com/tags/enhttps://paulanthonywallis.com/2016/11/15/the-lachlan-macquarie-internship/
Tue, 15 Nov 2016 08:38:46 +0000paulanthonywallishttps://paulanthonywallis.com/2016/11/15/the-lachlan-macquarie-internship/Spiritual formation and what Latin American liberationists call conciensization are often most powerfully achieved through intentional, close community. That’s why I have counted it a great privilege to have served as the inaugural Chaplain to the Lachlan Macquarie Internship. I wholeheartedly recommend this cross-political spectrum, spiritual and theological initiative by Jesus Generation Alumnus Nick Jensen – founding director of the Lachlan Macquarie internship.

Every state and territory parliament in Australia is now served by at least one alumnus of this cross-party-spectrum transformational internship.

The Lachlan Macquarie Internship is designed to foster a greater appreciation of the relevance of a Christian worldview to public policy and the believer’s engagement with it. The internship is offered selectively to high achieving post tertiary Christians considering careers in areas with influence on public policy. It aims to give them a foundational understanding of the intersection between religion and politics in Australia before they go into public life.

Paul and Lachlan Macquarie graduate Rohan McHugh

It was my priviledge to serve as inaugural chaplain to the first two internships – the first in Sutton NSW and the second in Burra NSW. The depth of training and the transformational power of intentional community in the months shared together are life-changing aspects to this program.

This transformational experience of living and learning in a close community of faith creates deep relationships that contribute to a better and more productive environment. Along with exposure to a broad field of distinguished leaders in the public domain who exhibit Christ like values and bearing, this encourages and equips interns for undertaking future leadership with integrity and effectiveness. By providing an academic and creative environment in which to grow in knowledge of history, theology, law, politics and Australian culture, participants of diverse political persuasions enter the political realm with a more robust motivation and purpose.

Nicholas Aroney is a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Queensland’s TC Beirne School of Law, and also the author of the curriculum for Lachlan Macquarie Internship. Nick delivers core curriculum on the internship.

Stephen Chavura holds a Ph.D. from the University of New England, Armidale. His book, Tudor Protestant Political Thought, 1547-1603was published in 2011. Formerly a lecturer in Political thought and history at Macquarie University, he e has also published articles on church and state and secularism in colonial Australia. Stephen delivers core curriculum on the internship.

Paul Henderson OSB has been director of research and programs at a public policy think tank publishing research and writing policy on education and welfare. He has worked out of the Prime Minister’s Office as Secretariat to a small group of cross-party MPs working on education reform in New Zealand. Paul was educated at Ampleforth College, Aberdeen University, Cambridge University, and Laidlaw College. Paul delivers core curriculum on the internship.

JGEN ALUMNUS – NICK JENSEN, FOUNDING DIRECTOR

Nick holds a Bachelor of Theology from Charles Sturt University, and a Bachelor of Arts from the Australian National University, majoring in philosophy and religious studies. Nick previously worked as the ACT Director for the Australian Christian Lobby, organising their 2008 election campaign. He also writes regularly in the CityNews and has spoken widely at churches and conferences. In his engagement as a JGen Chaplain, Nick developed a passion for the impact of intentional community living on leadership and policy – and has now lived in Christian community for more than a decade. Nick is married to Sarah, who works as a a medical doctor. Nick and Sarah are parents to two gorgeous children – Micah and Bethany.

The Lachlan Macquarie Internship provides a mixture of the following:

community based living

intensive teaching sessions

coaching and mentoring

networking and relationship building

discussions with a wide range of prominent Australians

experience within politics, NGO’s, think tanks and lobby groups by short attachments

Paul and Lachlan Macquarie Graduate, John Austin

at the first LMI Graduation Ceremony in 2011.

The internship program runs for a period of 14 weeks with the program being offered twice a year. Character, knowledge and experience are developed through academic discussion, reaction education, manual labour, relationship development and community living. Work experience is provided at policy related locations including politicians’ offices, social welfare groups, media outlets, and research/lobbying organisations. The daily rhythm balances lecturer seminars, academic reflection, community conversation, public service and contributions, and dinner discussion with prominent Australian figures. This focus enables the interns to build solid relational networks, more thoroughly form their understanding of values, and develop deeper vision to enrich the arena of public life and governance.

In today’s Australia the adversarial aspect of our politics dominates and often diminished political life. At times there appears to be to be very little goodwill or cooperation modeeled in political and party relationships. Through its focus on creative academia and community living, it is our hope that the relationships developed through the Lachlan Macquarie Internship will contribute better understanding between parties and between government and the public service long into the future.

“Thank you for the character you have built & the time you have spent with God!” (J)

“Truly a pleasure to sit at your feet. I love the way you communicate the Gospel – not only in the words you choose, but in the very way you speak…a clear gift of discernment…how pertinent and timely your messages have been!” (C)

“You obviously care for people…a great support. You choose your words carefully and prayerfully – because you are faithful they hit their mark. You also have a great voice!” (S)

“I have yet to meet anyone with more wisdom, passion and personal integrity than Paul. His ability to speak into people’s lives and to see years into the future is an exceptional gift.”(Nick Jensen – LMI Director)

A couple of years ago I met a group of young people who had been co-housing for around 8 years. It had begun as a group house populated by a group of University students. Most student group houses don’t last beyond a year. But these guys were serious about it. As they continued through their years of study and beyond, they worked out disciplines that made their little community work better:

• Financial disciplines – (to a degree) a common purse
• Shared rhythm of prayer and worship – some provate some open
• Patterns of group meals – some private, some open
• Patterns of hospitality

Does that sound familiar ? And as they honed their household life it began to attract others. It attracted young people on the fringe of the church scene and those way beyond it. Young people would seek it out when they needed a place of prayer, sanctuary or pastoral care. Quite organically, their home became a place of ministry. When I met them – about eight years into the experiment – they were just beginning to realise – without any pride about it – that it was through the patterns of their group house that they were seeing the most powerful expressions of pastoral care, hospitality, evangelism, disciple-making and conversion of life. Here was the life and witness of the Body of Christ. NOTE: They didn’t set out to plant an emerging church or be neo-monastics. All they had done was try and make their household life work in a Christian way. And that was the result.

• Jah Works in Doveton, Victoria would be one example.
• UNOH in Melbourne would be another.
• Peace Tree in WA would be another.
• The community hosting the Lachlan Macquarie internship in the ACT would be another.
• The l’Abri communities in Switzerland, Britain and Holland would be another.
• A Cul de Sac in Turramurra NSW – which has filled up with Christian households – led as a cluster community by Jock Cameron and Tim Pickles – whom some of you may know. Their detractors call them the “cult de sac”!

There is a seventh worth noting. I have not put it in the slides because it’s a pattern in its early days. But there is a global move to creating environments of constant prayer – eg “Boiler Rooms” and the 24/7 movement. This gets my attention because there was a wave of new monastic communities post WWI and into the 1930s which flowed from a desperate hunger for prayer and intercession in an era of failing churches. This hunger was found most acutely among the Anglo-Catholic clergy of the day. And it led a number to form new houses for prayer – some of which evolved into new monastic communities. I wonder if we may be seeing the beginnings of something similar today.

The first six patterns that I have outlined above flow from a hunger for…

• Closer community
• Deeper levels of discipleship
• Greater conversion of life
• Greater missional impact
• More meaningful ways of belonging to one another and journeying together

These movements may be a hunger for new ways. But they need not mean a movement away from Anglicanism. Indeed Anglican missiologist Peter Corney talks about the potential for making our churches look more like this;

i.e. a pattern with a whole range of ways of belonging. And he writes about the potential for creating high commitment, close community structures, as an option within the structure of our parish churches. And I believe there is real mileage in that – be that at the parish level or on another level… district …diocesan? And I believe that some of these more disparate structures I have mentioned – associate structures and chapters – provide ways of journeying together that are relevant to places where there is a lower population density.

So I leave you with a question. I offer it with respect because I know that for some of you your very work is tied up with answering this question in practice from week to week. But it may be a new question for some of us:

“If the energy for such expressions is grassroots, (ie if people are discovering these ways for themselves rather than because their institution has set something up for them) and we therefore find ourselves entering, post start-up into these kinds of stories; how might we as pastors, bishops, regional superintendents, home missions directors, build relationships that embrace, add value that is welcomed and serve the new things that God is doing among us today?”

A PERSONAL POST-SCRIPT

The lessons I learned in my years in neo-monastic expressions of church have enriched my view of the smorgasbord of church life. It has extended my vision well beyond the world of purely congregational expressions. With my fellow JGen alumni I think I carry in my make-up the indellible impact of life in intentional community.The impact of our time in intentional community has spoiled us for the “ordinary” or half-hearted and given us a hunger for authentic expressions of the life of God within and well beyond the conventional! In the friendship-based framework of The Simple Way it informs my personal rule of life to this day.

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Tue, 15 Nov 2016 03:40:01 +0000paulanthonywallishttps://paulanthonywallis.com/2016/11/15/introduction-to-new-monasticism-pt-2/
Lindisfarne (UK) home to St Aidan
and many other greats in the great cloud!

I want to share some thoughts on phenomena that today are being labelled by some as emerging and neo-monastic. These labels can be confusing. They can mean one thing in the States, a different thing in Europe and yet another in Australia.

Neo-monasticism has a 10 point charter in the US. If your group bears those 10 markers you can wear the neo-monastic badge. Here in Australia we are in a more exploratory place…

Emerging…in the US signals a move a way from patterns of faith and spirituality that have been overly narrow, uncreative, pre-packaged and coercive. In Europe it signals a shift in people’s ecclesiology and approaches to mission. It signals a shift to grassroots initiative. People are discovering new patterns for themselves – not because the institutional church has set something new up for people to join. Emerging patterns are grassroots generated. Here again we’re in a more exploratory place. It means “watch this space”!

GenY is a simpler one(?) It means people born between the mid 70s and the mid 90s. You can see this week’s City News for more details. There’s an article “7 myths about GenY”. I would just say that GenY is not a demographic in a bubble. GenYs think a certain way about work – for instance – because of the experience of people in my parents’ generation – and in their parents’ generation. GenY are a part of a society whose attitudes are shifting – and they are at the sharper end of those shifts. But – and it would be interesting to compare notes on this – I reckon we are all a bit more “GenY” than we were a few years ago!

Many of the groups I am going to describe are populated by the GenY demographic. I am going to tell you some stories – to illustrate six patterns which have been moving people in directions we might describe as new-monastic.

Pledged Co-Housing
monks and nuns living together
+
Postulants
people trying it out
+
Tenants
this included married people and families who would live on the monastery farm and participate in the life and worship of the monastic community. Monasticism is not just about celibate men and women.
+
Workers
these would live off campus but share in the work of the community – whether a community factory or a community farm.
+
Retreatants
people coming for pastoral/spiritual counsel
+
Associates
people who come because they have an ongoing pastoral connection with a Monk or Nun as a spiritual director. And they would have a way of sharing the values and rhythm of life of the community in their own setting.
THE FIRST NEW PATTERN
A GROWTH IN RETREATING

Thirty years ago the world into GenYs were emerging was one where all kinds of Christians began to re-discover the prayer-retreat:

• Believers seeking a more grounded experience of God’s guidance
• Believers wanting longer times alone with the word of God
• Contemplatives seeking deeper levels of pastoral counsel
• Disengaged Christians looking for new roots
• Christians hungry and thirsty for an environment of prayer.

A whole gamut of forces began bringing more and more mainstream believers into contact with this. They would turn up as retreatants – staying with old monastic communities, houses of prayer, retreat houses…And some of the traditional monastic communities began to bulge with retreatants. Visit a monastery or convent and take a note of when the “new guest block” was built. It’ll be the1980s.

Literature, music and liturgy from as far away as Iona, Lindisfarne & Taize began finding a place in our churches because of that kind of conact. At this convention we began with a welcome liturgy from Ioan. For instance!

Then something else happened. People going on retreat would experience
• Closer Higher-Commitment Community
• More Contemplative Life and an Environment of Prayer
• A Simpler Lifestyle
• A level of counsel deepened by the life of community
• A more intentional encounter with God

And having tasted it wanted to take it home with them. So this phenomenon – Associates – began to balloon in order to accommodate that. Being an Associate usually means
• Sharing in a the values, virtues and rhythm of life of the community
• Adopting new rhythms of prayer and new disciplines to strengthen ongoing conversion of life
• A commitment to regular pastoral time with a spiritual mentor within the community

And these associate structures have been bulging as GenY have grown up in church life. So while Benedictine vocations to monkdom and nunhood have fallen off, the Oblates – their associate structure has been steadily growing. Same with the Franciscans internationally – their Secular Order is growing. And that pattern repeats in other orders too.
SECOND NEW PATTERN
A GROWTH IN ASSOCIATE STRUCTURES

Around the Western world people have an appetite for these associate structures because they are hungry for deeper levels of counsel and discipleship than they are achieving in their local churches. This has to make me wonder if there may be aspects to parish life which militate against this deeper kind of engagement with one another. Because all these new customers have been coming from congregational and parish churches; hungry and thirsty for this deeper engagement. It is this hunger that is forging a fresh connection between the monastic and the parish strands of church life.

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Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:45:03 +0000guywinterbothamhttps://agilebuccaneer.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/mother-im-a-bit-of-an-agile-addict/Dearest Mother,You wanted me to describe my new job as an Agile Coach. Well, it’s a little hard to explain without explaining how I got here as that journey helped shape how I do what it is I do. The story starts with who I was when I left to go to America. I was a young introverted electrical engineer, who enjoyed his eclectic music and as your correctly summarized “didn’t suffer fools easily”. I left Australia on what was supposed to be a six-month contract with my company. I was to work on a steel mill automation project, destined for Russia, then return home via England visiting family. The plan never happened as plans seldom do but oh what a journey it turned out to be.

The Australian company didn’t stay in the US for much longer and so I was out of a job. I had to find something else besides electrical engineering to support my new family. I had to start becoming a bit more outgoing. I convinced a company to take me on the gamble that I would work out as a systems admin. This is someone who maintains computers and their operation rather than programming them. It worked out but that tiny medical billing company got sold.

I had to start being a bit more flexible. I was able to convince the railway that I could be a software developer. They took a gamble and I was able to develop an application to help customers submit shipping information via a modem (that same device I used to endlessly take over the home phone line for). That expansion into commercial software development started to ground my technical abilities in something beyond the tools of an electrical engineer.

As the projects I worked on grew, I had to become a bit more open to working with other developers. As software teams grow to handle more complex applications you need more people with different skills. I found I was able to help teams form and find ways they could learn to play well together. I could listen and mediate. Less to do with technology and more to do with people. I still needed to understand the technology to be taken seriously by the “the techno tribe”.

I started to manage the installation of our system at remote rail loading facilities. I had to be a bit more used to reaching to the people I came in contact with and making a connection. Like the time a yard manager at the St Louis rail terminal spent an entire week trying to harass me into losing my temper. I had to learn to b a bit more patient of the fools I had to suffer. Eventually, he admitted he couldn’t get me to bite and we began to trust each other. He went about helping me do everything I needed to do. Collaboration through patience.

To move up in the organization I thought I would need to be a bit more of a manager. The company gave me a semi-manager role. They told me a need to tell this new team to do what the company wanted to them to do. I didn’t like that one bit. When I tried for a manager role I was passed over for some nice chap who fit their command and control mold.

I needed to get out of my comfort zone a bit. I thought around the year 2000 that with the burgeoning telecommunications field of the Dot.Com boom, I would have no problem. Little did I know I was looking while it was collapsing. I had to be a bit to be a little less selective but still was able to get a manager role at a company making bowling equipment in Richmond. I managed their electronics development group. I managed away. I didn’t like how managers had to be like parents. I didn’t like people working for me and expecting me to direct their work lives. I much preferred working with people and collaborating. Sharing and learning from each other. It was at this time I started to hear another way of developing software that aimed to connect software development teams more to their customers while making it a more collaborative experience for the folks doing the development. I started bringing in these ideas of “Agile Software Development” (Agile for short) into how we worked. Pity the company when into receivership before I could do much with it. I was let go. Dark times.

Richmond was more of financial services town than an electrical engineer’s heaven. I had to reinvent myself a bit. I canceled a trip to visit you and put the money towards a Project Management Professional certification. That seemed to be the close match to what my resume spoke to. After six months out of work, I found a financial software company willing to take a gamble on me as a project manager. It was a small company but fully engaged in doing Agile software development.

Agile combines small teams of developers, testers and people who know what they want in the software product. Instead of working to a long term plan, they work in short spurts of maybe a week or two. They focus on producing high-quality working software, a few features at a time. At the end of these spurts, they expect to have a new version of the software that they could offer their customers. It is very different from what project managers typically do. They work on long projects that produce nothing until near the very end. These long projects work on big chunks of software, laboriously documenting what it should do, developing all the computer code in one lump, then rushing to test it before the delivery date.

They call this Waterfall software development, from the analogy of large buckets of software flowing from one stage (gather the needs, develop the computer code then test like crazy) to the next. Late into a project of maybe several months to a few years, you often find the product no longer meets the customer’s needs. You rush to finish what they no longer want and end up leaving defects that make the product less usable.

By developing a bit at a time on one of these Agile teams, you have time to course correct and deliver something valuable sooner. By making it all less rushed you can focus on making sure you don’t leave defects in as you go from spurt to spurt. There are even tools that help developers automate lots of boring tasks so they can focus on making more and learning more. This making more and continually learning more skills makes the whole thing seem more like a guild than a software factory. Developers and folks who test the software work closely together. They learn each other’s trades. They learn more about their own.

You would think companies would love this approach. However, it does require a company lets go of the teams they previously kept under their thumb. Not many companies can embrace Agile without changing their culture. They have to change their culture bit by bit. Those that can benefit from having more of a community feel, anchored by these guild-like teams. The leadership has to convert from being one based on command and control of people through a fixed hierarchy to one based on servant-leadership. That is, first focus on meeting the needs of teams rather than directing them. Every bit of me wanted to do a lot more of this. It felt more like being on a team, much like my soccer days, than managing a team.

Around this time I was also coaching my kids on their soccer teams. Rec league soccer consisted of the unpaid coaches and the kids. Some of the kids wanted to be there and some didn’t. Some were at a stage that they could play a physically demanding game and some were still developing. I had to become a bit more of a teacher and realized that coaching was more about helping kids find better ways to play together rather than to win. That started with me becoming a bit more playful. I called myself Coach Goose. I was assisted by some really great coaches with their own unique styles. Coach O’Mallard was a saint with my oldest’s team. Coach Loon was willing to be silly along with me, with the younger ones. I probably had the worst record of any coach but it was not about winning a season but how the kids enjoyed themselves and being with each other. In that light, we won every season we played.

On the professional front, the financial software company took a bit of a tumble during the financial crisis of 2008. I moved onto consulting. Consulting was the first time that I experienced being measured by the hours I worked rather than what I bought to the table. It’s a bit like being a cow hooked up to a milking machine. Your billable hours are measured by the buckets they fill rather than the creaminess of their taste. You have clients. Your herds of developers are guests on their farm. You serve your time and then are dispatched. I worked hard to protect the herd. I could not do the sort of Agile I wanted to. I could not make it a great experience for the folks on the team. Learning was as limited as we could not experiment on the client’s dime.

Experimentation is a big part of Agile teams. They take the time to “sharpen the saw” and improve how they work. Just like guilds. On the last consulting job I worked, it was less like a dairy farm and more like a slaughterhouse. No sense of team. Despite the increasing misery, I learned a lot about how people quietly suffer at work, in an endless drama of conflict, suffering a less visible form of violence. Agile is a bit fragile. It can easily be co-opted by management wanting a fancy title to their form of command and control. That is what consulting became for me and I was a bit sick of it. I did, however, get to experience teaching and mentoring teams on how to adopt these Agile practices and I wanted to be able to do more of that.

I had to have a bit more faith in myself. I have found a company that does have faith in me. I’m rolling the good and the bad of this journey into my version of an Agile Coach:

I teach and mentor teams how to do Agile software development.

If they don’t want to play the “Agile game” I don’t force them.

I am not their manager. I don’t tell them what to do.

I coach them how they can make their software a bit at a time, with higher quality and deliver it sooner so they can delight their customers.

I show them different ways of playing together as a team. I help the stronger players to work with the weaker players. They don’t hold each other accountable, a catch phrase hiding command and control thinking, but hold each other up.

I take an interest in the person I’m working with. What else on going on them. I’m not their therapist but it helps to know something about therapeutic techniques.

I listen a lot. I ask questions. Sometimes to learn more and sometimes to prod at their thinking.

Change is hard. I try to make it feel safe for folks to get out of their comfort zone if they want to. I call it making it Safe-to-Play. Adult play is a lost art. I hope I can add some back into the workplace.

I don’t follow a plan but lay out a journey for the folks I coach. Sometimes we follow it.

I don’t lecture. Sometimes the answers to my questions are not what I expected. That doesn’t mean they are wrong. It just means we are going to learn something new.

I spend more time learning than I can remember with maybe the exception of University. The Agile community is always finding ways to incorporate ideas from other fields and it is hard to keep up.

Agile Coaches often feel like they are imposters and don’t know enough. I read, listen to audiobooks, read and write blogs, and watch videos online to keep up.

I help the organization finds its way along a path of change so that the Agile teams can flourish while the leaders can become more like servant-leaders and less like command and control managers.

All these changes can become sources of conflict. I manage that conflict. I don’t always resolve it. Changing the way a software organization works requires diversity in thinking – good conflict – in order to grope their way through a complex cultural jungle.

Not every day is about winning some battle over Agile vs non-Agile worlds. I don’t need to win the game. I make new friends by helping them. I get a bit of a helper’s high when I do and it’s addictive.

Each coach has his or her style. I have been able to connect with a more open and playful side of me. You remember way back when I was briefly involved with bringing the New Games movement to my school. I was recently able to connect with one of the original founders of the movement. He confirmed that all this learning I was doing has me on a path towards finding ways to make work more playful. More engaging and more guild-like. Less of an industrial factory. Being an Agile Coach is a stop along that path and I’m enjoying what it allows me to be and people I’m working with to become a better coach.

But I have not really answered a burning question I expect you might have. How did that annoyingly nerdy, introverted, eclectic lad become someone who enjoys connecting with everyone he meets? How is it, he now enjoys quiet conversations in which his whole aim is to bring out the wonder in the other person. To make them feel special by paying such attention to what they have to say. To take such an interest that the simple act of being in conversation together becomes a state of flow where time passes unnoticed. It’s quite simple really. Each day I practice becoming a bit more like you.

Happy are the people whose strength is in you! whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way. Psalm 84: 4

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. Henry David Thoreau

Arthur Boers, in his book, The Way is Made by Walking describes his camino as, “walking 500 miles to church”.

There are many routes all across Europe. The popular Camino Frances begins traditionally in the French border town at the base of the Pyrenees Mountains called St Jean Pied de Port. It is about 500 miles from there to Santiago de Compostela. I’ve read a stack of autobiographies of those who journeyed the Camino and described falling, breaking body parts, having blisters as big as a bagel ( Arthur, just cant get that image out of my head).

Early on I was determined that I would NOT have a DNF (“Did Not Finish”). To do this I would train, train, train. I would walk in Joyce Rupp’s relaxed manner (Walk in a Relaxed Manner, by Sr. Joyce Rupp) I would slather my feet with Vaseline and whatever else I had to do. Yoga, and Barre classes three times a week help me to build those core muscles to support the pack. It was rough at first but in time I could do those crunches with ease. When my Barre teacher commented that I had strong dancer legs. I demurred, “Well actually these are yoga legs”. Downward facing dogs, up dogs, cats and cows, turkish twists all got me in the rhythm of stretching which I now feel at ease doing on the camino to both warm up and wind down from the day. Im grateful for balance poses-dancer, balancing stick, and airplane that help me stay steady on my feet. I haven’t lost weight (probably due to the post-workout lattes) but I feel strong.

Strength is the gift on this journey of preparation. Building core strength indoors needed to be balanced with outdoor strength and cardio with the actual backpack. An online friend advised me that if I could get tackle Barr Trail on Pikes Peak here in Colorado Springs twice a month then the Pyrenees will be a piece of cake. I did that once to twice a week all Fall. I learned that in high dry altitude it took me 2 hours to climb to the top of the switchbacks. That evolved into one hour and then another hour beyond that without getting winded. That gave me confidence to try the Manitou Incline which is one mile straight up. For 4 years I thought the Incline was only for Olympic athletes and soldiers. Labor day weekend was my first effort. It took 2 hours, and one sack lunch to make it, but I did! In two months I was down to an hour and half.

I also discovered a new trail community with my hiking discipline. I’ve met homeless folks accompanied by kittens and Pit Bulls, winded flatlander tourists, an Arizona native who taught me a “Navaho shuffle” to go faster, over packed international students determined to summit , a family celebrating a birthday, a woman hiking in Gucci high heeled sandals (haven’t figured that out), and a sweet little girl who, after climbing to a high place, stopped, flung her arms out to the valley below and sang “alleluia, alleluia”. Indeed, nature summons the best from us and brings us together in that spirit of community or in camino lingo, “communitas.”

Sometimes on the trail all that is needed in community is a nod, a knowing smile, and even once in a while a hearty, “Buen Camino!”

Think about it: What are your spiritual disciplines for your journey of faith?

Last time, I kicked off the conversation about leadership trends that are shaping or misshaping the church. Here are two more assumptions about church success that we need to reevaluate:

3. Hub and Spoke

Another trend is to presume that an expert, professional hub has all the answers. It supposes that those at the centre (imagine a wheel) have the resources, expertise, knowledge, power and authority to lead, provide for and guide those at the other end of the spokes. The assumption is that your every day ordinary Christian is, well, to be put it crassly, incapable on their own. It creates a dependency on an outside source which neither inhabits nor relates to the context, denies the giftedness and Presence of the Spirit at work in every believer and, therefore, will never be sufficient for that people and place.

It assumes that “one size fits all” and that that “size” can be managed, stimulated and controlled by the systems, structures and experts of the hub. In so doing, it implies that what those “on the rim” need, does not reside within them or is insufficient.1 Yet, it is this very insufficiency that opens us up to the work of the Spirit! In this vulnerable space we experience the wonder and joy of trusting the Spirit as we return from a foreign yet promised, land, carrying a cluster of grapes on a pole between us.2 According to Henry Nouwen, “the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love.”3

4. It’s All About Me

A fourth and related default concerns the individualistic approach to life and faith. It’s about me: my needs, my relationship with Jesus, my comfort, my salvation. Church leaders therefore not only give their attention to the needs and perspectives of the individual but also are arranged according to a hierarchy of individual relationships. Catholic missionary Vincent Donovan deems both idolatrous. Love of the former consumes the vast majority of the church’s resources, time, energy and talent producing “a plethora of meetings and chapters and synods and councils and committees” while “individualism has its obsessions also: individual responsibility, individual morality, individual vocation to the priesthood, self-fulfillment, individual holiness and salvation…with little room for community in between.”4 Charles Taylor calls this the “unprecedented primacy of the individual.”5

The organization seeks, trains, and caters to the individual, forming an association or collection of self-selecting individuals. But does Christianity make any sense outside of communitas, the community of God’s people formed by, witnessing to, and participating in God’s mission?6 Missional leaders recognise the importance of WE, of the community not only in terms of discipleship, the shaping of imago Dei in the image of our Lord and Saviour, but also in terms of our vocation as the salt and light of the world in the world.

Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk assert that “Missional leadership is not effectiveness in meeting the inner, spiritual needs of self-actualizing and self-differentiating individuals or creating numerical growth. It is different from building healthy, non-anxious relationships among members of a congregation so that they appear attractive to people outside the church. Missional leadership is cultivating an environment that releases the missional imagination of the people of God.”7

Jesus sends out the twelve as well as the seventy-two in pairs, implying not only that it is about our going but that we cannot bring good news on our own but are sent together to do so.8 In fact, it is when we are in community (two or three) in Jesus’ Name that we are assured that Jesus is there among us.9 Missional leadership, then, is not only a communal experience but also a mutual experience.10

We are in this together! A church, then, is a self-organizing community on mission not, as has been assumed so often, a managed system.

Leading this kind of community challenges missional leaders to break out of systems management into the unpredictable open space from where he and she can together call forth and encourage all to become citizens of their own neighbourhoods and of the Kingdom of heaven (again or for the first time) as communitas.

In the final installment, I’ll discuss incarnational identity and the actions vs knowledge conflict.

Alan Hirsch, quoted by Michael Frost in Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture (Peabody, MA:Hendrickson, 2006), 123. “Communitas” is “a community infused with a grand sense of purpose; a purpose that lies outside of its current internal reality and constitution. It’s the kind of community that ‘happens’ to people in actual pursuit of a common vision of what could be. It involves movement and it describes the experience of togetherness that only really happens among a group of people actually engaging in a mission outside itself.”

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Tue, 12 Jan 2016 08:15:30 +0000RadicalDiscipleshiphttps://radicaldiscipleship.net/2016/01/12/3616/https://theinfinitegame.org/2015/12/03/star-wars-myth-and-marketing/
Thu, 03 Dec 2015 11:46:03 +0000Nathaliehttps://theinfinitegame.org/2015/12/03/star-wars-myth-and-marketing/West Australian press (newspaper and radio) enjoyed the point of view of Star Wars from a consumer culture perspective. Thanks to the ECU Public Relations team for their support in getting me in touch with reporters who gave air time to serious research about a subject that quite a few people take very seriously…

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Fri, 20 Nov 2015 02:07:03 +0000Arthur Georgehttps://mythologymatters.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/thanksgiving-as-mythmaking-in-action/Just about every people has had its etiological creation myth explaining how their society came about and why it is special and favored by the gods. The ancient Greeks had a variety of them. In a lesser-known one, contained in Plato’s Menexenus, Socrates explains how the goddess Athena had brought mankind forth from the land of Attica, which gave the Athenians a special nobility and closeness to the gods (237a-238b). The Romans traced their ancestry back to the noble Trojans through Aeneas, and also through Romulus and Remus. Israel traces its origin as the chosen people to the appearance of Abraham and the Exodus from Egypt, guided by God. So after a brand new society was established in North America by people who had abandoned Europe, one could expect our own mythical account of America’s cultural and social origins to appear, and that’s what we got.

Thanksgiving commemorates in mythical, idealized terms the cultural conception of our nation eventually leading to its political birth in 1776. Other than July 4th, it is the only holiday that is uniquely our own and provides a sense of national communitas (see Turner), and so holds a special place in the American psyche. It is our biggest holiday for travel, traditionally to the home of our family elders where each of us individually too was conceived.

We have reshaped this holiday over the centuries according to our self-perception, a mix of our higher ideals and our national shadow. In his most famous book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer showed how each generation of scholars portrayed Jesus in its own image. Thus, during the Enlightenment when human reason was most valued and being exercised, scholars focused on how Jesus could not have performed miracles, and naturalistic explanations were proposed for these biblical events. In progressive times when educated people had a strong social agenda, Jesus’s own social agenda and ethics were highlighted. More recently some scholars have even argued that he was gay – a sure sign of our changing times. The story is much the same with how Thanksgiving evolved.

To understand the real origins of Thanksgiving, we must look back across the Atlantic to the Puritans in England and Holland. They had revolted against the Catholic and Church of England’s many annual holidays, which they viewed as either pagan in nature or popish inventions. Instead, they developed the twin practices of holding days of fasting and of thanksgiving, always on weekdays rather than on Sundays, and officially declared by the congregation. When something bad happened and people concluded that they had offended God, or when God’s help was particularly needed, the Puritans held a day of fasting, penitence, humiliation, and prayer. When good things happened, they would hold a day of thanksgiving to give thanks to God’s providence, which day started in church and ended with a communal meal indoors but without other festivities. These days were occasional in nature because the exercises of God’s providence could not be predicted, so there might be several such days each year, or none.

The Puritans, including the Pilgrims, brought this tradition to America. What became known as the “first Thanksgiving” in 1621, however, was an entirely different kind of affair, and so at the time it was not even called a thanksgiving. Specifically: It was not officially declared, it did not have a particularly religious orientation, the invited guests (and majority of participants) were heathen (in the technical not pejorative sense), it was held over three days, the feast was outdoors, and it included recreations. Held probably at the end of September, it rather resembled the traditional annual secular harvest festival observed by non-Puritans in England. (Baker 6, 26; Love 69.)

The event itself actually happened more or less as we have traditionally understood it, except for minor inaccuracies (e.g., no log cabins, the Pilgrims did dress in colors, turkey was not the center of the menu), so there is hardly any myth in this respect. Fortunately, we have a written eyewitness account, by the Pilgrim Edward Winslow, which is worth quoting:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, so that we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labor. . . . At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which we brought to the plantation . . . . And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you [Englishmen] partakers of our plenty. We have found the Indians very faithful in their Covenant of Peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us: we often go to them, and they come to us. (Winslow, p. 61 (spelling modernized).)

The trouble was that this information was in Winslow’s letter to people in England published in a collection of Pilgrim letters in London known as Mourt’s Relation. Only a few copies were brought back to New England, and they soon disappeared. Fortunately, a copy was discovered in a Philadelphia library in 1820, but it was published in full only in 1841, in which edition an editor, Rev. Alexander Young, everlastingly termed the event the “first Thanksgiving,” without regard for what that term originally meant. In the interim of over two centuries, there had been no published account of the Pilgrims or this event. (That of another Pilgrim, Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford, which did not actually describe this feast, was published only in the 1850s.) This meant that for all that time the Thanksgiving holiday evolved in a tortuous fashion and without commemorating the Pilgrims’ 1621 feast. There being no solid historical accounts to rely upon to anchor the holiday, the mythmaking began.

One of many 19th-century portrayals of Native-colonial violence against a Thanksgiving background. Here arrows fly through the door as one settler grabs his musket. “Thanksgiving Day in New England Two Hundred Years Ago,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 27, 1869.

As the colonial population grew beyond the Puritan strongholds and became more diverse, fasts and thanksgivings did not die out but rather changed in character. People began to anticipate and aggregate providential events, and by the end of the 17th century a pattern emerged of regular fasts in the spring (when the fate of the crops was uncertain and God’s grace was sought) and thanksgivings in the autumn, which became more like traditional secular harvest festivals, and people tended to believe that thanksgivings had always been customary and in this form. The dates were proclaimed by individual colonies, and they differed.

The first national Thanksgiving day was proclaimed by George Washington in 1777, and it had both a religious and military flavor. It was held in December that year in thanks for the Colonial Army’s victory at Saratoga, which Washington (at least in the proclamation) attributed to God’s providence. The proclamation also implored God for further blessings, especially to inspire our military commanders with wisdom and fortitude, and also for economic prosperity; it also called upon the people for penitence and confession of sins, thus also reflecting fast day traditions. After another national Thanksgiving in 1789, although many individual states held thanksgiving days on various dates, no further national Thanksgivings were held until the close of the War of 1812: one in 1814 and two in 1815. All were similarly military in character, and were not associated with autumn. After that no national Thanksgiving day was proclaimed until the Civil War. Ironically, the first of these was proclaimed by the Confederacy for July 28, 1861, in thanks for its victory at Bull Run. President Lincoln later proclaimed one for April 13, 1863, in thanks for the Union’s victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, and at Shiloh. It was in 1863 that Lincoln proclaimed a Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November, which finally began our unbroken succession of national November Thanksgiving holidays, although that could not be foreseen at the time.

Although a regular national Thanksgiving holiday came late in our history, autumn thanksgivings on various dates had long been traditional on the state level. The meanings given to the holiday, however, changed over time with the fashions and politics of the times. Thus:

During the 19th century for so long as warfare with Native Americans in the West continued, early colonial thanksgivings were portrayed (see first illustration) as giving thanks in part for defeating this enemy (which purpose actually was sometimes expressly the case, as in a 1723 thanksgiving proclamation of Massachusetts). No sign of the first Thanksgiving’s camaraderie here!

But late in the 19th century, in the era of reconstruction and national reconciliation and into the Progressive Era, when America had become a melting pot, the theme of national unity in diversity became a prominent, and Thanksgiving became an occasion to celebrate our immigrant, African American, and Native American components (see second illustration).

Thanksgiving, wherever celebrated, was consistently tied, if not to the Pilgrims themselves, to an idyllic vision of colonial New England. The American Revolution, our victory in it, and also the victory of the Union in the Civil War, were attributed to traditional Yankee values and fortitude, which Thanksgiving came to celebrate.

Although thanksgivings originally were community (eventually nationally) oriented, by the end of the 19th century the national Thanksgivings had become family-oriented. The rapid change and instabilities in outer society caused people to focus more on the family and less on the larger community as a source of sustenance.

As industrialization took over our national economy and work life, nostalgia for a lost agrarian past developed, and Thanksgiving became a locus for celebrating and vicariously experiencing that idyll. This is when the harvest theme along with autumn colors became a lasting element of the holiday.

Nevertheless, Thanksgiving did not evolve primarily into a harvest festival. Rather, it was an occasion for an end-of-year summing up and thanks for the year’s blessings, of which the harvest was only one part. This explains the late November date. In those days well before climate change, the snows had usually come by then, and so Thanksgiving recreations included sleighing and skating. Jingle Bells was originally a Thanksgiving song!

Thomas Nast’s “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” Harper’s Weekly, November 20, 1869, featuring various nationalities of immigrants, as well as a Native American and a former slave seated in harmony around the Thanksgiving table. Uncle Sam carves the turkey while Columbia is seated at the far left. It was designed to promote ratification of the 15th amendment to the Constitution prohibiting denial of voting rights on the basis of race.

All the elements of contemporary Thanksgiving were in place by the early 20th century, but they did not come together until after WWII. The patriotic sentiments that arose during that war to preserve the American way of life caused Americans to look to the Pilgrims as our national parents and as a source of the American values thought to have made victory possible, as the Pilgrims were perceived as the most pure and spiritual of the colonists. The “first” idyllic Thanksgiving, which had been on the fringe of public knowledge for about a century, now rose in prominence and came to stand for the first time at the core of our concept of Thanksgiving, as a commemoration of our national origins.

The story of Thanksgiving could now serve as a myth of creation, with its turkey dinner as a national civil eucharist. It did not matter that through most of our history there was no such tradition. It is an example of what some anthropologists call the “invention of tradition.” (See Hobsbwawm and Ranger.) A holiday, by definition, is a “holy day” when one retreats from everyday life and profane time into sacred time and space (here the home of the elders of our families) in order to share a sacred experience with those to whom we feel close and share communitas. The most fundamental kind of holiday celebrates the creation, which inevitably is tied to the creation of one’s society. This is what Mircia Eliade called “The Myth of the Eternal Return,” through which each year a community of people holds a festival that takes them back to a mythical golden beginning, in illo tempore. (Eliade 1991.) And inevitably our vision of our own creation will mirror our mythical, ideal vision of our society at each point in time as it evolves.

Sources and Bibliography

Baker, James. 2009. Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday. Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press.

Bradford, William. 1984. Of Plymouth Plantation. New York: Knopf.

Eliade, Mircea. 1991. The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Ranger, Terence, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, United Kingdom: University of Cambridge Press.

Journall of the English Plantation at Plimoth. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966. This is a facsimile of the original of Mourt’s Relation containing Edward Winslow’s account of the first Thanksgiving, at p. 61 (cited as “Winslow”).

Happy occupant of office location, owner of LLC and licensed physician. Looking for a shingle…

It’s official: my medical practice, “Communitas Primary Care,” will be located at 10900 Highway 3125, Suite F. Lutcher, LA. Opening date will be sometime around summer or fall of next year. In the meantime I have to find a shingle.

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Fri, 23 Oct 2015 20:04:14 +0000jessicasumbyhttps://anationofcreation.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/with-the-help-of/The idea of a creative community taps into another dimension of S-D Logic that could be a great tool for marketing the arts; Customer-2-Customer value co-creation. Rather than just customer and business value, this recognises the social side of things. It’s important for arts marketers to understand social consensus plays a big part in shaping what individuals see as valuable (Edvarsson et al., 2011). #FaceTheFoliage now has thousands of posts with consumers continuing to encourage others to upload their own flower faces. Looks like the social consensus says yes to Blakeney!

4,957 posts on #FaceTheFoliage and growing every day! (Instagram, 2015)

Following on, a sense of community develops between tourists who share an experience (Turner, 1995; Rihova et al., 2015) and I think the same can be said for consumers of art. JR’s ‘Face2Face’ project perfectly demonstrates this value of C2C co-creation for marketing art. The project involved photographing Palestinians and Israelis who did the same job and pasting them face-to-face on the separation wall dividing the two countries. His work defied political and social boundaries, so on an artistic level, Palestinians and Israelis co-existed peacefully, something that would be unheard of without art. The amazing thing was, there was no dispute from either side of the fence. Both consumers, though opposing in reality, collaboratively engaged in the art, some even actively participating in the project. The project allowed them to form a temporary communitas (Rihova et al., 2015) and realise; perhaps they weren’t as different as they thought.

Nuns getting involved in the action (JR, 2015a)

A talking point of the town (JR, 2015a)

Face to face. Can you tell who is Palestinian and who is Israeli? (JR, 2015a)

Initially, the traditional festival field and the high arts were quite distinct – based in high and low-brow tastes/consumptions; proliferation of festivals (though diverse) have offered a point of integration, multiplicity of discourses.

In this expansion, festivals can be a site where collective effervescence is enacted – or questioned, as increasingly fragmented identities stakehold and negotiate meanings and roles within the festival sphere – raising questions of cultural (and at times political) citizenship/representation.

Europe’s history of war, xenophobia, and nationalism have developed in stride with globalization, trade, cultural exchange. Despite sense of distinct nation-states, interrelation is more present with the cosmopolitanism of mega-events and festivals. Impacts of production and dissemination of identity, place – as well as the notions of interdependence and peace amongst nations. Ehrenreich 2007 discusses the “history of collective joy” of Europe, noting the history of festivals as developing from prehistoric and pre-modern times. Using the “techniques of ecstasy, these festivals included “the use of such things as rhythmic music, dancing and singing; feasting and drinking to excess; the use of masking or face decoration and costume to change appearance; playing ‘the fool’, inverting social roles and mocking hierarchy; and generally active and significantly spontaneous participation by audiences and participants en masse” (126). She mourns the “post-festive era” of the late modern times (post-WWII), with the rise of neoliberalism and individualism as a breakdown for these types of festivals (and the communities that they build). However, Roche argues, there has been a grand revitalization of these types of events – yet, within new forms.

“’Festivalization’ can be taken to refer to the role and influence of festivals on the societies that host and stage them – both direct and indirect, and in both the short and the longer term. Festivalization processes can be understood as traditions, institutions, and genres of cultural performance. These processes operate within social formations and their professional and community networks, and have both historical and contemporary aspects. They do so in relation, in particular, to collective understandings and practices of space, time and agency. That is, festivals can firstly be said to influence societies’ collective orientations towards and understandings of social space through their transient celebratory animation of particular locations and thus their influence on collective place identities. Secondly, festivals can be said to influence societies’ collective orientations towards and understandings of social time and time-consciousness through the standing and active recognition of their calendars and through the links these calendars offer with memorable and narratable pasts, with the sociocultural rhythm of life in the present, and with anticipated futures. Finally, there is the issue of agency. Of course, festivalization in modernity can be reasonably interpreted as having mainly culturally hegemonic and ideological features and impacts [Roche 2000, 2006]. However, festivals and mega-events can also be interpreted from alternative perspectives […] emphasizing their positive implications for personal and social agency […] That is, they can be said both to embody and to reanimate the social agency both of those who produce and of those who participate in them, making a sense of theatrical, dramatic, and expressive power tangibly available to their engrossed and active audiences as much as to their leading performers” (127-128).

Modern festivals’ origins in the mid-nineteenth century expositions (built as a way to demonstrate the ‘goods’ of capitalism – innovation, exchange, etc.); festivals as a way to assert cultural dramas (through sports, fandoms, etc. – ways of drawing boundaries and exacting the powers of citizenship/membership). Now, expos and mega-events offered as a draw for international tourism, a call for globalization – instead the entertainment and dissemination of technology of years prior – drawing away from the power of the exposition. How are festivals (and the dissemination of ideas, notions of exchange, cosmopolitanism impacted by the Internet and other related technologies?)

CITES:

Ehrenreich, B. 2007. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. London: Granta.

Film and art festivals not merely just a consumptive gathering, but a way to build discourse (through discussion prior/post-consumption), and to offer space for interchange of identity. Festivals as a site of nation-building – a means to differentiate selections of culture, a way to specialize (kx^ but yet, also integrate) the types and styles of a national culture. Festivals as evidence of the secularization of culture – spectators (participants) as pilgrims that desire (kx^ a type of enlightenment, revelation, knowledge?) Despite breakdown of barriers, spectators are never fully “one” with each other or the festival– they are divided by social locations, interests, and are removed from many of the aspects of production.

Burn festivals as “short, secluded, outdoor gatherings based on founding principles such as self-reliance, artistic expression, and lack of consumerism” (3) – regionals as spinoffs of annual Burning Man originating in 1986.

New Social Movements as everyday activism – integrating daily behaviors and identities into directions of social change. Use of fragmented and individual identity/action to construct shared meanings, identity, goals; Melucci (1989) offers that modern conflicts link symbolism, identity, and personal expression to solutions. Festivals as understudied due to “undeserving” status and stigma applied to festival-goers (Adams 1998 – her study of Grateful Dead fans), who flaunt deviance, disorganization, drug use. Festivals may serve sociological attention due to undertones of rebellion, purposeful disorganization of social order, political undertones, development of fellowship, conviviality (Jankowiak and White 1999); festivals as site of ceremony and ritual within modern society (Shrum and Kilburn 1996) – however, many studies of ceremony/ritual/carnival as a study of individual actions instead of shared meanings and symbols (see also Jankowiak and White 1999).

Subculture not as core group, but as a “spread of cultural factors and collective identity through looser ties such as small, disseminated groups, information spreading, and diffusion through popular media” (13) – acknowledges fluidity of subcultural membership, meanings (Bennett 1999). Watch use and interchangeability of counter- and subculture.

Hunt (2008) –countercultural ideologies (drug use, for example) – particularly ones that are stigmatized by mainstream society, are reinforced and cast in positive light through connection and exposure to cc, which allows development of temporary communities and network maintenance.

Methods: “Notes taken included brief descriptions of appearance, verbal interactions, and non-verbal behavior and were elaborated more fully in notes at later periods not exceeding one day past the date of observation in order to preserve quality and accuracy (Mack et al 2005 here 13).”

Burn behaviors and identities are 1) “set free” – where oppressive external states repress who a person really is – burns are a site of freedom of expression; 2) burns are a place where people modify their behavior – where participants hold same identities regardless of context, but are heightened through burn participation.

“Turning to NSM, Melucci (1989) contends that modern day society (as he calls it, “complex society”) exhibits three qualitative differences from earlier time periods. First, he contends that power is no longer obtained primarily by the control of natural resources but rather the control and dissemination of knowledge and information. Secondly, our society and larger frame of reference has become global and interdependent. Lastly, Melucci contends that social actors are moving towards individualization, that is, we do not consider ourselves as coherently defined by structural social groups (such as class, race, or religion) as we once did, leaving present-day social actors grasping at individual meaning. In short, our destiny as a human race is no longer as determined by natural occurrences so much as by the choices that we make. Melucci states that this logic impacts the individual, leading us to seek our destiny through our personal choices (e.g. a lifestyle) and participation in social change” (here 82).

Chen’s (2009) study of changes and authenticity in Burning Man as a reflexive process, offering adaptation and carryover into mainstream venues – fragmentation that is gaining sway in larger society.

On our big crazy learning adventure of a government software project, we had returned so soon to plan a new release. Once again anointed to do a Fist of Five commitment exercise at the end, I had challenged myself to make it more playful than the last. After the flat out fun I was asked a pointed question: “What was the point of that exercise?”. Essentially, what was the point of play? The short answer may mean this is the last time I’m invited to invite others to play. There was no point.

We had gathered for the two days of our SAFe releasing planning event. The way things work on this project is there is a big batch feature elaboration with the goal of getting approval prior to planning. It siphons off the non-starter features and yes it is the target of an improvement to get to single piece flow. That win is for a future day. We had switched up the format to have teams focus on planning for one day without the client then work with the client on risks and issues for the second day. I had offered ways to split the work to minimize dependencies after reading and facepalming to a Ron Jeffries’ blog on SAFe planning. We added in some practice reviews like story slicing which was appreciated.

Allowing the teams the space to work their way through complexity on their own was a definite win. The stickies began to fly. This crafting day enabled teams to get into a flow but offered little need to collaborate. I was reminded the one reason I like these sessions has nothing to do with the SAFe script but all to do with the chance to connect with folks. So I was concerned that so little time was spent by the teams connecting with each other. It was all so mechanical. An efficient process that maybe was not effective in meeting my needs of spending time to getting to know folks. Moreover, the rush and pressure left us short of time on the first day so no Fist of Five.

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”- attributed to Plato

Day 2: some of the clients joined us in person and some by phone. Teams went through the ceremony of presenting their plans, risks and challenges they needed help with. I sat through in a mental infinite loop on whether it was a good idea to do the play I had rolling around in my head. I was trapped between wanting to play but not having a point, a lesson, a learning moment in hand and Fist of Five time was fast approaching.

Play is bounded often by time or place, it has a start and eventually ends. I needed something to announce play. I needed a signal for others to join and where the play was to unfold. I didn’t want a game though.The idea that there must be a point or a goal is a difference between a game and play. There are so many wonderful games to help folks learn and change. Having that self imposed end of a goal is what seems to have made games more palatable in a corporate environment. They serve a purpose in supporting a narrative of directed change. That’s is just not the full potential of play I was after.

“Enforced exercise does no harm to the body, but enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion, and let your children’s lessons take the form of play.” ~ Plato: The Republic

Play for the sake of playing, to have fun just for fun seems outside the bounds of the corporate experience. It garners the label of being silly with the associated judgmental view of being bad. Games are good but play is frivolous. What then might be a way to wrap play in a way that it can slip in without out the baggage of goals?

The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story ~ Dr Stuart Brown

On that day the best I could come up with seemed to be enough. Wrap play in a story. A story allowed enough of a distraction for folks to overcome the awkwardness to start of playing with no purpose.

The exercise I chose was Laps as described by the inspiring Bernie DeKoven. I fashioned a story about how Release planning is all about teams taking off when the difficult part is having all those teams land their work on the tight tarmac of a production deployment. I explained the Laps exercise in terms of an analogy. First I asked that only our team form the circle. I didn’t have the tables or chairs cleared. I used them as an example of the impediments and difficulties that must be removed during the development for a release. Then the magic started happening.

I had excluded the client at first as a safety measure. I wanted the request for them to play with us to be refusable, making it safe for them to play or not play as their individual nature or their culture led them. But one of their leaders had ignored me and was already in the circle, playing the part of of a chair and table impediment remover, helping the circle form. All I needed to do was make sure the knees of the adjacent players was about the same.The guidance about matching knee height is critical. This fun works for tall and short and all other dimensions, provided the sitter is not significantly taller than the sitee. Otherwise the sitter squats unable to find the sitee’s knees with a domino effect of falling likely.

In that act the client signaled to her tribe that it was safe to play and more importantly showed they had a part to play in the release story as well as the fermenting fun. It was clear that the story had served its purpose and now melted away to be replaced by play. We did a test sit or two followed by the real thing and the smiles reigned supreme followed by laughter. Titles and organizational hierarchies melted away. For one brief moment on a long journey we were one in fun, in communitas.

Play trumps control. One lady was intent on sitting and simultaneously snapping circle selfies. She paid so little attention to where her target knees were I was afraid of a domino disaster and I asked her to put the phone down. Thank heavens she ignored me. The circle demanded I join. I replaced another in the circle giving my phone to them so they could photograph the fun. In the excitement that other flubbed the photographing. I had to apologize to the lady who snapped and sat after the fun was finished. It drove home to me the importance of trusting in players. People will find their limits and work to find their fun. If the game is well played, others will change to make play work. Here that meant nothing more than shuffling their feet.

We finished our Fist of Five afterwards but it seemed so much less than the chance to revel in the awkwardness of proximity. We didn’t need a purpose because our individual needs were being met. If not there was no compulsion to remain in the circle. But nobody in the room chose to do anything but be in the circle. We may not have not had a point but play helped us become closer. To look at each other with soft eyes. The story served a purpose to signal play and that it was safe to play. It seemed to be unexpectedly right in that it gave a passage to that liminoid bubble that was inside the place of work but was in no way work. I’m going to try it again for the next crazy group fun I initiate because regardless of what software we release I will be planning to play.

“…we said that, except in the case of some rarely gifted nature, there never will be a good man who has not from his childhood been used to play amid things of beauty and make of them a joy and a study…” ~ Plato: The Republic

Special thanks to Eric Boyle for alerting me to Plato’s play-full quotes.

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Wed, 03 Jun 2015 02:42:33 +0000p.w.eubankshttps://saunterings.com/2015/06/02/from-point-a-to-point-b-or-learning-to-navigate-the-sea-of-change/One of the first times I got on a plane, I remember being mesmerized less by the crazy notion that I was several thousand feet above the earth and more by the notion that in a matter of hours I had gone from point A to point B and found myself plopped into an entirely different culture. A giant flying bus did more than leave the ground; it took me to a whole other way of thinking about and approaching the world. A big air-pressured container was built to take me out of my comfort zone. I’m still blown away by this. There’s this moment when you step out of any given airport and realize that “here” is no longer “there” and “there” isn’t really “here,” and everything immediately after that is all about negotiating those differences in order to navigate whatever comes next. In a manner of speaking, I feel like I could plot the last several years of my life into that metaphor of being dropped into point B and finding myself somewhere new only to begin again the process of collecting myself, surviving, then thriving. That is something I crave and love out of life. But it isn’t an easy way to go about your life, because it demands change and all the struggle that comes with that. It’s as if a caterpillar goes thru the hard process of becoming a butterfly, and you don’t really imagine the butterfly on the other side of the process going, “What do I have to do now to become a bird?” Maybe being a butterfly really is good enough. And I sometimes feel like I went from, “Butterfly was fun. Let’s see what turtle is like now.” The cocooning process is hell. But worth it. Too worth it.

On a similar tangent, I’ve been traveling a lot lately. A few weeks ago, I found myself taking two ferries (the first to Long Island and the second to Connecticut) to head north of Boston for a basic counseling skills workshop for adventure education with a group of social workers and therapists. Maybe it was the nature of how open-minded you might expect those folks to be, but the group cohesion happened almost immediately. It was as if we were plopped into Point B but all treated it as Point A together. We trusted each other right off the bat, maybe not because we chose to trust strangers but because we trusted ourselves and knew who we were well enough to be able to put ourselves out there with incredible honesty. It was one of the most refreshing experiences I’ve ever had – to be around people as eager as me to get to the heart of matters and skipping all the social pleasantries for something more honest. So ever since the workshop, I’ve been thinking about this process of entering a new community – the struggle of being your full self, the fear of being judged, the excitement of finding new people who mesh so well with you.

In the study of anthropology, there’s a concept known as “liminality” which applies to rituals observed in tribal groups. The technical term, deriving from Latin, refers to a “threshold,” a point at which a tribal ritual has begun but is not yet complete. In that space, in the betwixt and between, something magical happens – relationship. Actually, the technical term they use to describe it is communitas, referring to a shared, common experience which transforms the group into something new and can sometimes relate to the manner in which the group has been driven together by what it lacks and, thereby, what it seeks to attain or achieve together. The concept isn’t so foreign really: it’s the cohesion formed by a military unit of new cadets or pledges in a fraternity undergoing some form of hardship, if not hazing. It’s the awkwardness of twelve year-olds in a church confirmation class as they learn to question what it is they do and don’t believe – together. It’s summer camp and those first few moments when the kids are staring at their lifelong best friend whose name they don’t even know yet. They will be tested by the very normal experience of community and the hardships that come with the unfortunate promise that we will love each other and probably hurt each other, too, to hopefully learn to love each other again. Point A to Point B to Point A to Point B, and again.

So, this afternoon, when I found myself sitting in a small bedroom of a building built in the late 1880s that overlooks the Peconic Sound, I found myself again in the betwixt and between, among new friends, each and every one of us facing transition with worry and excitement, and I realized that I was where I needed to be, despite some awful allergies. There in the threshold was communitas waiting, and whatever was right ahead would be faced and endured together. The best of it and the worst of it, and what mattered was that we were (and are) “we” and not I. That as lonely as the cocoon can feel, it is a process all caterpillars encounter and endure. And what incredible hope there is in that. Even there in the upstairs of that 130-year old building, I suspect we weren’t the first people to sit there and realize the scary and exciting transitions that lay ahead for us. It had been done before and will be done again. Wherever you are, whatever you’re facing, I hope you can remember this much: there are other caterpillars in the cocoons, other people on the plane or on the bus, other campers in the camp, and we all – if we’ll admit it – know what’s come and what’s coming. And we can and will, if allowed or desired, hold one another in accountable love in that space. So, see you at Point B. …or will it be Point A? Or aren’t they really the same?

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Thu, 30 Apr 2015 12:53:36 +0000francescamontemaggihttps://francescamontemaggi.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/rite/There are two films that best capture Victor Turner’s ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’: Stand by Me and Animal House. They are not about tribes in remote parts of the world. They are about young kids growing up or refusing to grow up, in the Animal House case.

Stand by me tells the story of Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton) and his group of unconventional friends going on a journey to find the body of a missing boy. The kids are ‘other’, they do not abide by social norms. Gordie is very quiet, Chris (River Phoenix) comes from a family of alcoholics, Teddy (Corey Feldman), who has suffered violence from his father, is eccentric, and Vern (Jerry O’Connell) is fat and bullied for it. They don’t fit in society and are valued less for it, as Gordie’s father shows when he asks Gordie why he can’t have any (normal) friends, like his late brother. The group goes through various adventures in the woods. Like a traditional rite of passage, they leave the community, face adversity, which makes them mature but also unites them. That’s when liminality and communitas come in.

For Victor Turner, ritual is a process with different stages:

separation from everyday activities, relationships, and environment

Liminality

Reintegration

The ritual allows a moment of dispensation from the structure of society. Liminality is ‘anti-structure’, the moment when all hierarchies, statuses, and roles dissolve. In the liminal stage, the person does no longer engage in the activities that are part of his role in society (it’s mostly about men, this model for ritual doesn’t really fit women, as Bruce Lincoln and Caroline Bynum explained).

Liminality is “betwixt and between … likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon”. (Turner 1966: 95)

In that liminal moment, communitas arises. Communitas is a spontaneous community of equals. It is an undifferentiated “communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders” (Turner 1966: 96). The liminal stage then gives way to structure. The person is reintegrated into society with his new identity and can fulfil his duties.

Turner had a romantic idea of communitas as a spontaneous assemble of equals. He saw that in hippy groups and the early stages of the Franciscan order (before it became an order). I doubt communitas actually exists for more than a moment, but here may be two instances. The first is from Stand by Me.

The second if from Animal House. What is striking in this scene is that, just like in Turner, the ritual candidates are all dressed in the same way, men and women, and they all follow the ritual instructions of the officiant, Otis Day.

Jester wanted. Must be mirthful and prepared to work summer weekends. Must have own outfit (with bells). Bladder on stick provided if required. ~ The Times, August, 5th, 2004

I’m lucky to be on a large crazy project. Large enough to have its own ways but with a leadership willing to step back and ask the question – “Who do we want to be in the future?”. Who are we now? A collaboration of contracting companies working on a large legacy government portal, heavily interconnected with other departments and agencies in such a convoluted way I lovingly refer to it as Conway’s Nightmare. The program director had gathered what amounted to the royal court of the project – the leadership team. I was invited to join. A facilitator led us through a pretty neat icebreaker that reminded us to be empathetic to our different management styles. Part of the introduction involved a description of our roles. I dutifully announced my current label from the 2-D Org Chart but on a whim decided to describe how I saw the part I played. I said I was the Project Jester and somehow it felt right.

My current wanderings through the literature of play and related anthropology has led me to the works of Victor and Edith Turner on rites of passage and the phenomenon of communitas. The models of transition and change appeal to me as they tie notions of play to tribal transitional rituals. I see my project as a collection of tribes, interconnected and diverse but practicing only the ceremonies of Agile. The Turners’ descriptions of ritual is a layer beyond ceremony. The participants are deeply connected on the path through a transitional or liminal stage on their way to a changed state or status, be it a ritual of adulthood or a seasonal celebration. Key to the transition to the liminal state, betwixt-and-between different planes of reality, are the initiates and the those who shepherd them through to a state of shared being or communitas. Edith Turner quoted anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff’s list that included those shepherding roles:

Jesters then have already been recognized for their role in creating a liminal state in courtly politics. The Medieval Jester or fool came in two forms. The Natural Fool was often “touched by God” and amused the court despite being simple or moronic. The Licensed Fool however, had no such mental affiliations and was given the right to question and to dig at the politics of the day. Provided they didn’t overstep the line, kings and queens found them both a source of amusement and council. Over step and they might lose that license along with their head.

“And, let me tell you, fools have another gift which is not to be despised. They’re the ones who speak frankly and tell the truth, and what is more praiseworthy than truth?” Erasmus (1469–1536): Praise of Folly

Mind you, I have not seen any equivalent to the modern Certified Fool, who claims the right to counsel others based on nothing more than training resulting in a piece of paper and an acronym after their name.

“…every despot must have one disloyal subject to keep him sane.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

You would think with Jesters being so universally recognized and embraced that they would have lasted down the ages. However no official state Jester had been employed in the United Kingdom, for example, since Archie Armstrong, Jester to Charles I. Cromwell abolished the role in 1649 after the execution of Charles I. Then 350 years later the ad above from the Times appeared. The English Heritage had advertised and although they didn’t represent the state, it did garner a lot of coverage. The appeal of the Jester was still alive. Maybe the idea of a Jester as change agent in the modern courtly corporate world was not out of the question.

Organizational change is hard at the best of times. From what I have seen of organizations or even my project trying to “Go Agile” suffer the same resistance as McMaster et al describe:

“We contend that failed change efforts reflect a failure to “unfreeze” (Dent 1999; Lewin 1947), i.e. to abandon the old institutional order. Organizations seek to preserve their current identities, unless there [is] a powerful reason to do otherwise… only when people reach a threshold of sufficient dissatisfaction with existing conditions will they initiate action to resolve their dissatisfaction” (Van de Ven 1995).”

They portray the rejection of a structured Information Systems methodology (here I equate to Agile Transformation) in terms of “the failure to “problematize” the situation In such a way as to portray the methodology as the accepted solution to the troubles and difficulties besetting the organization”.

Leaders need fools and vice versa~ Manfred Kets De Vries

McMaster et al discuss similarities and differences between what we call change agents and the notion of a corporate Jester. They saw the key being the humor injected by the sage-fool as a way to take the edge off the more formal agenda of a change agent. They saw humor as not only empowering but also as a tool of subversion, a reflection of the necessary betwixt-and-between liminal state as a form of the rite of passage of organizational change.

They reference other findings:

“Bovey and Hede (2001) examined the relationship between humor and organizational change In a survey of nine organizations undergoing major change efforts, they found humor to be associated with a “ready and willing orientation” to change. The maladaptive defenses, on the other hand, were associated with a resistant disposition.”

A little poking around and it seems this concept of a corporate Jester is anything but new. In the forward to Russell Ackoff’s Management f-Laws, Gerard Fairtlough, Formerly CEO, Shell Chemicals U.K and CEO, Celltech notes:

“As long ago as 1993, Russ came up with the idea of a corporate Jester. In his column in the journal Systems Practice, he wrote: ‘Medieval royal courts had court Jesters who unfortunately disappeared even when the courts remained. They should be reincarnated and placed in corporate courts… Corporate Jesters must be able to ask questions that others either have not thought of, or dared to ask. In addition, they must be able to provide answers that are not expected, even by the ‘kings’ before whom they perform.’ ”

Maybe then my pronouncement as the Project Jester is not so crazy a notion after all with one personal twist. Although I enjoy the power of humor in the workplace, I also see a shortcoming. Humor by its nature, ridicules. If you are on the side if the ridiculed then it leaves a judgmental taste in the mouth. Even self-deprecating humor can end up a judgment of oneself. If I bounce this idea up against less verbally violent ways of communicating I have come to appreciate, like Marshal Rosenbergs’s NVC techniques, humor alone just doesn’t feel like a right step on the path to sustainable change. As Kets De Vries notes:

“Freud also mentioned that “humor is not resigned; it is rebellious” (1927, p.103). In many instances, joking behavior is used as a way of getting back at figures of authority. The fool turns into an anarchist, using humor to make the breaking of rules and regulations less objectionable (Goffman, 1967).”

I’d like to think a better version of the Jester’s role leans less on divisive reflection and more on collaboration. While they necessarily create that liminal inversion of power triggered by the sort of questions that the licensed fool dares to ask, the progression should be to one of play not anarchy. Play lives outside the normal experience of the workplace. Those who chose change need that outsidedness so they can experiment in a suspended and separate “place”, unconstrained by the daily grind of policy and procedure. I suggest then that part of the role of the Jester is to help create an environment which is more than “safe-to-fail” or even “safe-to-learn”. Beyond the transition is a new state of being and flow for a group that the Turner’s call communitas. A “place” in which collaborators in change can find it “Safe-to-Play”.